As much as we’d like to keep stressful American politics far away from our personal lives, many consider it too important of a topic to keep on the back burner while navigating the dating pool. For some, like a friend of a friend who lives in Brooklyn, it’s actually issue number one: her Tinder (MTCH) bio reads, “Ignorance will not be tolerated✌🏻aka don’t be a fan of trump.”
The seventh annual Match.com Singles in America survey, which polled 5,000 18 t0 71-year-old U.S. singles of all races, genders and sexual orientations, shows she’s not alone. According to the results for New York City, who a potential partner voted for is among the biggest reasons to give the person a chance or immediately reject them.
Nearly half of New Yorkers (47.41 percent) said they consider a vote for Donald Trump to be a major turn-off, making being a supporter of the president the second biggest disincentive for dating someone (complaining on Facebook came in at number one with 53.77 percent). This comes as no surprise, seeing as how the majority of the city population is made up of democrats.
But it’s about supporting Hillary Clinton almost as much as it is about hating Trump. According to the survey, 30.19 percent of New Yorkers consider a vote for Clinton to be a major turn-on. This lands a Clinton vote at number two on the list of biggest turn-ons for residents of the five boroughs, second only to the 38.21 percent that are especially into entrepreneurs.
“If you really disagree on basic values, you may have some real trouble down the road.”
Although the scope of the 200-question study covers a wide range of topics such as millennial attitudes, social media and feminism, politics was especially relevant this time around. Match.com does ask about people’s political persuasions annually, but only some years does it find it necessary to correlate the data they gather to politics.
“For example, one year we found out that republicans have more orgasms per sexual bout, but far less sex,” said their Chief Scientific Advisor, Helen Fisher, who is an acclaimed biological anthropologist at Rutgers University. “This year, we did it again because we were in the middle of an election year.”
And so it would seem that Trump supporters may find it more difficult to find love in New York City. But Fisher tells the Observer, “I don’t know the data on that, but I would think so… I think Trump supporters are going to find other Trump supporters, but I think there are going to be far fewer in a city like New York.”
Fisher says these statistics go well beyond just “Trump vs. Clinton.” It all goes back to an individual’s values and belief system: whether you’re for Planned Parenthood or not, whether you support the travel ban or not and whether you are concerned with the harassment of women or not.
“When you’re dating somebody, in the beginning, you can be madly in love and overlook their values,” she said. “But as time goes by, you might end up living with this person, and perhaps marrying this person, and perhaps even having babies with this person. And if you really disagree on basic values, you may have some real trouble down the road.”
